THE POLITICS OF POVERTY ERADICATION

David Rieff, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015) ("In revolutionary moments, institutional thinking tens to be formulated in zero-sum terms. And even in non revolutionary moments, once a course of action is undertaken that its architects believe will be transformative, admitting failure or, worse still, error, or for that matter even changing course without any such admission, is not something that ever comes easily to large, powerful institutions such as the World Bank, the development agencies of major Western donors, or the major philanthropies and development NGOs." Id. at 109. "It is a commonplace that shameless self-promotion is all but inscribed on the DNA of contemporary culture. Go on Twitter and you'll find a huge number of the tweets go roughly, 'A wonderful article/speech/intervention by John Smith,' and then you note the heading reads, 'Retweeted by John Smith.' When Norman Mailer published a collection of essays in 1959 called Advertisements for Myself, such self-promotion was thought by many to be unworthy of the serious writer Mailer certainly was. Today promoting oneself isn't viewed as shameful, it is actually viewed as part of doing one's job. And as we all seem so hellbent on 'branding,' and advertising seems reasonable to people even though advertisements are manipulations at best and usually outright lies, what matters more and more are one's good intentions, not whether one is telling the truth. How else to explain the twenty-first-century fashion among philanthropies, UN agencies, and campaigning groups (including a number involved on food issues, notably Bono's ONE Campaign) to ask people to vote on what kind of world they want? Have people become so skilled at quelling their own common sense that they believe such appeals, which are essentially polls, and polls taken in a world increasingly run as a plutocracy, with inequalities of money and status not seen in Europe of North American since Balzac's time, can translate into political or social power? But as in the proverbial case of the emperor's new clothes, it is in no one's interest to say what a sham, what a simulacrum of democracy this particular fashion is self-flattery and the manufacturing of consent really is." Id. at 119. From the book jacket: "Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and development experts agree the eradication of hunger is an essential task for the new millennia. Yet in the last decade, the prices of wheat, soy, and rice have soared. It has condemned the hundreds of millions of the world's population who live on less than one dollar per day to a state of hunger and insecurity." "In The Reproach of Hunger, Rieff, a leading expert on humanitarian aid and development, searches for the causes of this food security crisis, as well as what lies behind the failures to respond to disaster: failures to address climate change, poor governance, and misguided optimism. Riff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, as well as the interventions of celebrity campaigners, whose  busineess-led solutions rob development of political urgency. He dismisses the idle hope of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that food scarcity can be solved by technological innovation alone." "The path ahead, Rieff reminds us, demands we rethink the fundamental causes of the world's grotesque inequalities and understand that what is at stake is a political challenge we are failing to confront.").